Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Hans Svensmark hypothesized, in 1996, the "radical" and much maligned theory that the sun - not trace amounts of atmospheric CO2 - was the primary driver of our climate. According to Svensmark's theory, solar rays drive cloud formation, and it is cloud cover that ultimately determines warming or cooling of the earth by limiting how many of the sun's rays contact earth. He explains his theory in the video below:

Between flaccid climate sensitivity, ENSO driving “the pause”, and now this, it looks like the upcoming IPCC report will be obsolete the day it is released.

From a Technical University of Denmark press release comes what looks to be a significant confirmation of Svensmark’s theory of temperature modulation on Earth by cosmic ray interactions. The process is that when there are more cosmic rays, they help create more microscopic cloud nuclei, which in turn form more clouds, which reflect more solar radiation back into space, making Earth cooler than what it normally might be. Conversely, less cosmic rays mean less cloud cover and a warmer planet as indicated here. The sun’s magnetic field is said to deflect cosmic rays when its solar magnetic dynamo is more active, and right around the last solar max, we were at an 8000 year high, suggesting more deflected cosmic rays, and warmer temperatures. Now the sun has gone into a record slump, and there are predictions of cooler temperatures ahead This new and important paper is published in Physics Letters A.

The article cited by Watts goes on to address what was a primary argument against Svensmark's hypothesis, that while solar radiation caused small molecular formations in our atmosphere, these were too small to reach the critical mass necessary to form clouds given our current understanding of the chemical processes involved. The experiments done in Denmark show that to be false, that these small molecular formations do indeed reach critical mass. The implications of this are huge – in essence disproving the theory that CO2 is the primary driver of our climate.

In other news, the claim that 97% of all scientists believe in anthopogenic global warming is based on a methodology so broad that the mere mention that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas was considered confirmation. That sole fact is completely meaningless to the debate on what drives global warming - and thus meaningless to any supposed consensus. In other words, this study does nothing to separate those who believe carbon dioxide is the primary driver of our climate from those who do not. The study on which the 97% claim is made was done by global warming activists as propaganda to drive public opinion.

A paper published today in Nature Climate Change finds climate models have greatly exaggerated global warming over the past 20 years, noting the observed warming is "less than half" of the modeled warming. The authors falsify the models at a confidence level of 90%, and also find that there has been no statistically significant global warming for the past 20 years. . . .